Fade Out (24 page)

It was MOODY, one of Allbright's fourth-year cadets, who, a few hours after Connors had left for Washington, suggested the airport lights. The idea consisted of covering the plateau with a twenty-five-yard-square grid of blue taxi-way lights. The lights, fixed to the tops of wooden stakes, were to be individually powered by car batteries and protected by cutouts.

Since the circular magnetic field around Crusoe would activate the cutouts – and disconnect the circuit – his position could be easily plotted on the grid by noting the blacked-out lights. Any further movement would be indicated visually by a change in the pattern.

Assuming the cutout zone was spherical and constant in size, a decrease in the area of blacked-out lights would indicate that Crusoe was going deeper, and an increase would mean he was surfacing.

The one snag in Moody's plan was that once the cutout had disconnected the circuit, the lights would stay out even if they were no longer affected by the cutout zone. The research group mulled over various mechanical devices and finally settled for a ‘cutout patrol' that would periodically reset the cutouts of the blacked-out lights to check on any change in the size of the field.

Max was so happy he forced one of his cigars on the nonsmoking Moody and actually got as far as lighting it. The grid of blue lights would give them Crusoe's new position and thus enable them to avoid hitting him when they drilled the two encircling rings of boreholes. It would
also show them that they weren't going to spend a week setting an elaborate trap in an empty chunk of rock.

It took a day and a half to get the lights and batteries, but by the time they arrived, the grid of stakes had been planted on a north-south axis.

Starting on the centrelines that ran through the crater, the four teams each took a quarter of the zone and began to work methodically outward. There were a lot of stakes and it was a long time before any of the lights worked. Then slowly, a neat pattern of blue dots started to surround a circle of darkness under which lay Crusoe.

While the grid was being wired up, the Air Force technicians produced a black, stylized contour model of the Ridge, complete with crater and miniature prefab huts. Small blue bulbs represented the lights on the grid, each of which had been numbered so that Crusoe's position could be given as a map reference.

Wedderkind and the other members of the research group clustered around the model and studied the pattern of blue lights. Crusoe's new position was about a hundred yards from the original crater. The diameter of the cutoff zone, which could now be measured by counting across the lines of blacked-out lights, was six hundred yards.

Max, who was standing behind the group, chewed up the end of another cigar. ‘How far is he down now?'

Brecetti, the physicist, searched in his pockets for a pencil. ‘Has anyone got something to write on?' Brecetti was renowned for having done most of his best work on the backs of envelopes and paper napkins. Wetherby found a clean page in his spiral-bound notebook and handed it over.

‘Let's accept the idea of a spherical field, with a constant radius of – say five hundred yards,' said Brecetti. ‘The patrol car broke down about a quarter of a mile from the crater not long after the first sighting, in which
case it's reasonable to assume that the cutoff zone was at its maximum radius. So… if the field now has a surface radius of three hundred yards…' Brecetti scribbled a series of figures. ‘… That means Crusoe is now about twelve hundred feet down.'

‘Jee-zuss,' growled Max. ‘He's practically out of sight.'

‘You're going to have to drill those holes a lot deeper,' said Wedderkind.

‘And fast,' growled Max. He relit his stubby cigar, pulled his yellow hard hat down over his eyes, and left.

While the grid of lights was being set up, Max and his roughnecks had been showing the cadet group leaders how to operate a rig. Under the Texans' watchful eyes, the raw crews began work at midnight, sinking the first holes in the inner and outer rings ahead of Crusoe's new position.

They worked continuously until Sunday morning, then were replaced by the second eight-hour shift. To keep the rigs working around the clock twenty-four hours a day, Max's crew racked up a solid eighteen hours a day, working, overseeing, cursing, cajoling, and putting in an occasional boot whenever a cadet began dragging his ass.

Wedderkind telephoned Connors in Washington. Connors had stayed to help the President in his discussions with the Cabinet, Senate leaders and representatives of various business groups on the cumulative effects of the fade-out.

Wedderkind gave him a situation report. The drilling,
which had gone on for five days and nights, had been completed, and each borehole had been primed with an explosive charge. To provide some additional insurance, Max had sunk the inner ring of holes to a depth of two thousand feet and the outer ring down to three. There had been no further change in the pattern of blue lights, and a new overflight by an MRDC survey aircraft with infrared film showed no discernible ‘hot spot' on Crow Ridge. Crusoe had apparently decided to cool it for a while at twelve hundred feet.

‘Okay, now you've got him surrounded. What do you plan to do, hit him with the drill again?'

‘Yes. With luck, that should get him moving into the first ring of charges. Keep your fingers crossed.'

‘I will. How's Allbright?'

‘He's okay. The latest rumour is he's offered a week's leave to the first man who finds a way to put a crease in his horse. There's only one snag.'

‘What's that?' asked Connors obligingly.

‘You have to spend it on the Rock.'

Since the completion of the high chain link and barbed wire fence around the site, Crow Ridge had been wryly christened ‘The Rock' – once the nickname of the infamous prison island of Alcatraz.

Allbright's passion for impeccable dress had inspired a number of jokes. According to Milsom, his trailer had been sited the farthest away from the crater so that, if Crusoe moved, Allbright's electric iron would be the last thing to cut out.

After five days of around-the-clock work, the cadet drilling detail were on their knees and rig-happy. Max gathered up his original crew of Texas roughnecks and got them to sink a final shaft in the centre of the blacked-out circle of lights.

The drill overloaded and burned out at 1,180 feet. As
they hurriedly hauled up the string of drill pipes, Crusoe sent a column of boiling mud and steam rocketing up the shaft to confirm the hit.

Half an hour later, the cutout patrol reported a change in the pattern of lights on the grid. The changes were transferred to the model. It showed Crusoe was on the move.

Wedderkind went up to join the group of spectators crowded up on the rocky peak of the plateau.

A little under an hour after contact, smoke and earth funnelled into the air as one of the one-hundred-pound charges in the inner ring exploded ahead of Crusoe's original line of advance.

Shortly after the first blast, there was an almost simultaneous explosion as the two charges on either side of the first were detonated.

Wedderkind gave the bridge of his glasses several nervous taps. ‘He's moving out, he's moving out,' he muttered, half to himself, and although it was not usually considered part of the reasoned, scientific method, he crossed both sets of fingers.

Crusoe's dark circle continued to move slowly across the carpet of blue lights, and began to contract as he headed down at a steep angle. One of the five-hundred-pound charges in the outer ring blew. The sound of the explosion came rumbling up from three thousand feet and erupted from the narrow shaft with a tremendous roar.

Crusoe's forward movement slowed, then stopped altogether. Wedderkind kept up his vigil on the Ridge until 1:30 A.M., then went to bed. No further movement was recorded that Wednesday night.

There was still nothing to report when Wedderkind sat down for breakfast. He began to worry that they might have damaged Crusoe with the big charge. Maybe he was floundering down there like a wounded whale, surrounded by a ring of explosive harpoons. Maybe they had totally misjudged the strength of his construction. Maybe…

In the middle of the morning, Crusoe began to move – backward, at a thirty-degree angle to his original line of advance. Wedderkind clapped his hands together exultantly, bounced off his chair with relief and borrowed another cigarette from one of the Air Force technicians manning the hut.

Crusoe's new course took him straight back across the rim of the inner circle, and detonated five more of the hundred-pound charges of dynamite. Undeterred, Crusoe continued his steady progress beneath the plateau. The circle of blacked-out lights continued to diminish in size. Just after three o'clock in the afternoon, the cutout patrol rode through the grid to reset the lights. This time, none of them went out. It meant Crusoe was over fifteen hundred feet down. From now on, only the exploding charges in the two rings would tell them where Crusoe was.

Wedderkind turned away from the model and looked at Max. ‘It's a good thing you drilled that outer ring down to three thousand.'

‘We should have gone deeper.'

‘There was no time,' said Wedderkind. ‘Maybe if we'd cut horizontal shafts through from the sides of the ridge…'

Max shook his head. ‘Ain't no way we could catch him. He's burning his way through that rock at the rate of two to three hundred feet an hour. No one can dig a shaft that fast. And even if we could, this son of a bitch cooks up a lot of rock. It would be like digging into the side of a volcano. If we'd got anywhere near him, we'd have ended up with barbecued knees.'

A little before 5 P.M. one of the five-hundred-pound charges in the deep outer ring exploded. Crusoe had now moved right across the circles they had set around him. It was now make or break. He had turned back once. The big question now was, would he turn back again – or keep on going?

The answer came within the hour as another of the big charges in the outer ring exploded. It was to the left of the previous blast. By nine o'clock, five more charges in the outer ring had exploded one after the other as Crusoe burned his way through the shafts.

In the research group's hut, Wedderkind went into a huddle with the systems engineers from NASA and the Air Force. They looked at a chart showing the two rings around the original crater and the charges that had already exploded.

Roger Neame, one of the ex-NASA engineers, pointed to the two pencil lines he'd drawn on the chart. ‘I don't know whether this proves anything, but it's interesting. If you join up the centre of the crater to this point here – where the first charge exploded – then join that to the first explosion on the far side, the angle between those two lines is thirty degrees and…' Neame drew a third line which cut the outer circle between the last two
charges that had exploded. ‘… See where that puts him? Right in line with his original course.'

Neame joined up the last point with the centre of the crater to complete a classic thirty-sixty-ninety-degree triangle. He pointed to the two charges in the inner ring on either side of the line he'd just drawn. ‘If those two blow, then we'll know he's coming back – right on target.'

It seemed too much to hope for. The next patrols reported that all the lights in the grid were still on, and unaffected by Crusoe's cutoff zone. It meant one of three things. Crusoe was stationary, off on a new course away from the Ridge to somewhere quieter, or heading straight down.

Wedderkind hung around the research shack until after midnight, then retired, leaving instructions to waken him if anything broke.

He undressed and took a long shower.

The fibre-glass unit in his trailer was like a stand-up coffin. Wedderkind slumped round-shouldered against one of the walls and let the spray blast down over the back of his neck. He tried to marshal into some sort of order the myriad possibilities that were whirling around inside his head.

Crusoe had turned back twice. Would he turn back again? He had blocked their radio communications, stalled cars, downed a helicopter, cut their power… why did he need to go underground? To protect himself? Against what – Man?

Or had he gone underground for some other reason? While they thought they were getting the measure of his reactions, was he merely testing
theirs
– measuring
their
intelligence?

Wedderkind mulled over Neame's ideas on the geometry of Crusoe's course and tried to read some significance into it. If Crusoe made a sixty-degree course change he would come back to the crater.

If the two charges indicated by Neame exploded, that at least would be proved beyond doubt… Wedderkind got an idea. Supposing Crusoe changed course as they hoped and found that the charges he expected to find weren't there? Would he get the message that they had predicted his move and were prepared to accommodate him?

Wedderkind lurched out of the shower, towelled the more vital parts of himself dry, and pulled on his pyjama trousers and bathrobe. He went out leaving the water running.

Max, who could really have done with the sleep, was still up playing cards and drinking bourbon.

‘Those two charges that we're expecting to blow,' said Wedderkind. ‘Can you pull them up?'

Max looked at the five cards in his hand. ‘You mean
now?
'

‘Yes, right away. It's urgent.'

Max hissed out the word ‘shit' between clenched teeth, threw his cards face down on the table, and scooped up his money.

The roughneck who was dealing began to gather up the cards.

‘Leave that.' Max jerked his thumb at the door. ‘Go wake up Cab and Lee.'